Showing Some People

I’ve been cutting on episode 9 for many, many months now. Last weekend I had the first request from someone to see something. It was Derrick, the guy who plays our main villain, Damon. Out of the blue he just asked if he could see something. So he came over to take a look. It was awesome.

Things that I thought weren’t working worked like a charm. He was so invested in the scenes as they played, even without their proper sound mixing and a complete lack of music.

I was already deep into a “let’s get this thing done” mindset, but that was mostly out of a sense of obligation and a persistent mental pull that starts to happen when I realize I’m nearing the end of the rough cut. But watching him watch it re-lit my passion for the thing. This is a fun episode and it’s time to reel the sucker in.

Then, the actor who plays Precious, Tommy Martin, came out for an hour-long shoot with us, after which we had lunch and watched a large swath of the episode. He seemed more put off by the unfinished nature of the episode, but his reactions also fueled the fire, and cued me in to some subtle pacing issues.

On Tuesday, Carlyn, who plays Sebastian, and her boyfriend, Sean, came over for a night of eating pizza and watching The Lost Boys.

–SIDE NOTE—

There’s this amazing video edit of the world’s buffest, oiliest saxophone player from The Lost Boys. Someone re-cut it to make it look like Michael is obsessed with him instead of with Star. And here, for all of our amusement, is the video:

–DOUBLE SIDE NOTE—

Apparently they say the word “Michael” more than 180 times in The Lost Boys. There’s one scene where Keifer Sutherland only had two lines of dialogue; the first line he ended by saying “Michael” in a growly, creepy way, and the second line he began by saying “Michael” in a slightly condescending and creepy way. The Lost Boys, man. And watching it on Blu-ray you can see that the dried vampire blood on the Coreys sparkled like glitter in the sun.

Anyway, Carlyn and Sean watched pretty much everything I had edited so far and it was great. It definitely sealed in my mind the pieces that had pacing issues and we talked them out a bit.

Of course, Eliza watched it with everyone as well and it’s always nice to get her read on the episode progress. She settled me down about certain things that I was thinking needed to be reshot.

Last night I buckled down again and edited another big sequence, but then the program froze and kicked me out. I lost about an hour of work, but that’s the first time that’s happened this episode, so I count myself lucky.

We’re heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend, but I’ve got a couple VFX shots on my laptop I can work on while we’re away. Obviously, I‘m going to prioritize having fun with Lize out in the real world and only spend a few hours a day working on stuff, but it’s nice that I’ll still get a little progress in over the weekend.